


"Don't look back."

by politicalmamaduck



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 20:59:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4579881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/politicalmamaduck/pseuds/politicalmamaduck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Tumblr's Women of Star Wars Week, Day 1 Prompt: “Don’t look back.”<br/>Leia tries to cope with her memories and the aftermath of Bespin. Trigger warnings for PTSD and nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Don't look back."

“ _Don’t look back_ ,” she thought.

_Don’t look at me. Please don’t look back at me. Close your eyes._

The rage and the tears and the exhaustion were all bubbling up inside of her, threatening to spill over.

_If you look back at me, I am lost forever._

He was looking at her the whole time.

She forced herself to look back at him, being swallowed up by that terrible machine, his hands bound.

That image of him, the way he looked at her ( _even though she was silently begging him not to, begging him to listen to her for once in his life_ ), seared itself into her mind for forever. She would never be able to get it out of her mind, nor from her nightly torments where the world was orange and smoky and she could still hear the screams echoing off the cold hard metals.

She was never sure which of them was the one screaming in her dreams.

She could taste blood in her mouth, laced with a sharp tinge of betrayal.

She felt her datapad slipping from her fingers. It was so, so cold. Her hands were numb. She couldn’t remember feeling this cold, even on Hoth. Her fingers wouldn’t move to pick up her fallen device.

“Leia, are you alright?”

Everything was cold and empty.

Leia was empty. She had thought that Darth Vader had taken everything he possibly could from her after the Death Star and Alderaan. Her world, her sense of self, her peace of mind ( _not that she’d had much of_ that), were gone in an instant.

She was wrong.

Now there was truly nothing left of her for him to have. Save her anger. She found herself lashing out at people who didn’t deserve it, especially her friends; her friends who were just as broken as she was. Chewbacca seemed to drift from one project fixing the Millennium Falcon to another, listless without his best friend and captain to ask him for a hydrospanner or play Sabaac with.

Luke was adjusting to his new hand, and on the surface calm and ready to resume his duties to the Rebellion; to start planning a rescue. But there was something of which he could not speak; it seemed as if the life had gone out of his eyes. Leia did not know how to even begin to ask him; her famed silver diplomatic tongue seemed to have lost all its silver and its diplomacy. But she could feel his pain, his agony that was so much more than physical and had felt it since she heard him calling out to her on Bespin, clinging to life with one arm. Something more than losing his hand had gone terribly wrong in his confrontation with Darth Vader, she knew, and yet she didn’t want to know. She knew enough.

She closed her eyes. It was remembering what she knew to be true every night, and not being able to escape it; knowing that Han was encased in carbonite somewhere; Force only knows what that awful bounty hunter and scum crime lord Hutt would do with him. Her mind made her relive her knowledge of what had happened to her every night, and she was just as helpless and defenseless as before.

Knowing that that bad feeling she had the entirety of their trip to Bespin had proven to be more than an instinct.

Knowing that Luke had been walking into a trap.

Knowing that Han’s former friend had betrayed them all, then saved them all; not knowing whether or not she wanted to trust him.

Knowing that look in Han’s eyes as she silently begged him not to look at her.

Knowing the nightmares would return.

_“I love you.”_

_Was that really her voice? The words sounded as though they were coming from someone, somewhere else, a thousand miles away. And yet she could feel herself saying the words, realizing they were true, that they had been true for far longer than she had cared to admit. They were written in her blood on her heart, seared there by his kiss._

_She couldn’t hear his reply over the screaming and the hissing and the mechanized breathing in the darkness._

_It was cold, so cold._

_“I know.”_

She sat bolt upright in bed, her fists clenched, not remembering having laid down for a nap with a blanket wrapped carefully around her, nor how she got from Command Center to her quarters in the first place.

Catching a glimpse of herself in a small mirror, the only luxury or frivolity she had in her quarters, she could barely see herself, the woman she had been before. The dark hollows under her eyes made her look far older than her years. _Don’t look back_ , she thought. It’s not going to change a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and constructive feedback greatly appreciated! You can find me on tumblr at politicalmamaduck.tumblr.com. A huge shoutout to my friend and editor, Desiree, for knowing how to coax my best out of me.


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